Joys of Winter

Butternut - I like the sound of the Artful Dodger cat. Was he working in tandem with the 'urban warrior jay'?

I'd like to hope so, Annobel - they looked to make a great team!
Have a hopeful New Year.

Yesterday resisted an overwhelming tiredness
But went to bed early
And slept for eleven hours.
If there were fireworks I heard none,
But maybe there weren't
In the heavy rain.
This morning no rain so went outside
And picked up sticks
Blown off the silver birch in the hurricane.
Bundled them up with string
And hung them on a beam in the woodshed to dry.
Good for lighting fires, silver birch.
OH axed apart the plum tree that fell
In the same storm
And dragged the branches up the hill
For me to attack with a chain saw
Some time.
Not today though as
The rain is back.

bagitha darling, please don't wear yourself to a frazzle. Feet up, good book, and plenty of you-time.

Don't worry about me wearing myself out, super. I'm quite simply unable to do that! Learned my limits a long time ago and stick to short bursts of activity punctuated with loads of rests.

bagitha ...a virtual (hug)

At last the countryside has turned its clock to winter
Bare trees, grass and sheep
Despite the mild air
And children playing out without their coats
Catkins out along the roadside.
Strode round Stowe
Admiring carefully crafted vistas
Temples, artful ruins and more sheep
In the lake cygnets feeding
Ridiculous with triangular sterns aloft
A pair of adults engaged in courtly dance
Heads bobbing together
Neck twining sinuously
They're not feeding
Look the swans are mating!
A first sighting for me on the first of the year.

What a delight (and surprise) to have seen the swans mating, Jess. I wonder if it's an auspicious sign on the first day of the new year .

I hope you gather your strength before tackling those plum branches, bagitha,
and I also hope it's an electric chain saw you'll be using and not one of those frightening petrol ones!
Take care. x

Yes I had never seen that before! It was all over in less than a minute once they had completed the neck dance thing.

Woke to a white world this morning.
The hills, when I can see them,
Are a thickish white;
The garden is a thin white, slushy
With sleet, then snow, then rain
Then sleet again falling within an hour.
More wind on the way too
Says the Met Office
So charge up the lamps
And get ready to fry eggs on the wood stove
For dinner.
And I won't be sawing logs today.

bagitha and JessM

Just went for a bracing walk - so lucky to be able to do a "country" walk without getting in the car. Saw some daffodils near the road that are about a week off blooming... there is a particularly early kind planted near the prison. But the temperature today is "seasonal" despite the sun.

Just in too, from a brisk "constututional" round the block, where all that was visible were a few brave survivors in people's front gardens. If we had gone out an hour ago, we would have had chilly sunshine. As it was, it was just starting to rain as we locked the door so it was an umbrella walk into 45% rain.

Tomorrow it will be horizontal, so could have been worse, and if the rain had started five minutes earlier we would have been stagnating indoors.

Now waiting for kettle to boil.

supernana and bagitha - I suspect you are both experiencing the results of the Joys of Winter without power - but you are both cheerfully robust so I expect you are making the best of it. Hope to see you back on line soon.

Yep, bang on, butty! Power back on after thrity hours without. Just had a shower in case it goes off again. Here were some offline thoughts:

Snow sticks to the gullies and rills of the hills
But the storm blows it off the round domes
In a wind strong enough to rip
Loose paint off an outside wall.
That's a new one, even for we
Who are used to the excesses of
Scottish winter weather,
Weather that makes you prepare
For regular and long power outages
With candles galore, rechargable lamps,
Camping stoves and wood piles.
Three kettles on the stove all day long
For warm washing and hot drinks.
Every now and then
That ferocious wind off the Atlantic
Blows a layer or two of cloud away
To reveal shining white topped cumuli
Sailing merrily above
Without a care in the world.
DH went out for batteries
And food that can be eaten cold.
Came back with stories of dinghies at the sailing club
Blown completely over the fence and over the road,
And beach boulders carried over the sea wall
And smashed onto the road.
Fallen trees aplenty.
Daylight waned from noon.

Yikes! Glad you are back with us. Do you get compensation from scottish power?
I managed to dry some clothes outdoors today. Feeling smug.

My goodness, bagitha - that was some storm, and a wonderful portrait of all things bringing light and warmth amongst such force.

I jolly well hope we'll get compensation from Scottish Power this time. We get power cuts every winter – a case of less expensive to bring in contractors from Merseyside and Wales to do repairs every year than update the system to cope with Scottish weather; gets harder to believe every year! – but if they are less than 24 hours I don't think they 'qualify' for compensation. Grrr. House lovely and warm now and LIGHT. With the stove we can keep warm (I got up a couple of times in the night to stoke it) but the darkness can be grim.

Wonder how super's doing? My travel barometer is beeping again.... another bout of low pressure and wind coming tonight.

Just spoken to super. She's fine and so is the bloshy cat and all his friends, but she hasn't been reconnected yet after 36 hours!!! With the short daylight hours and awful weather just to help matters along, it's sometimes hard to find where the crux of the probelm is, whether it's trees on the line or the line tangled around a pole, or whatever.

Pleased to hear she's ok and hope super is reconnected soon.

baggy I am glad to hear both you and super are ok.

Yes - me too.
Bloomin' weather. It's wild here again tonight so the hatches are battened yet again

We still have wind, but we also have
Blue sky!
And sunshine zapping through the house!
So nice after all the grey.
But even in the greyness yesterday,
In a storm lull
DD came rushing and said "Look!
The whole garden is moving!"
It was carpeted with chaffinches
Foraging in the grass.